books.google.ca - The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in 'Fiasco', Ricks combines these...https://books.google.ca/books/about/Fiasco.html?id=7s-uIICROyYC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareFiasco

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in 'Fiasco', Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster. As many in the military publicly acknowledge here for the first time, the guerrilla insurgency that exploded several months after Saddam's fall was not foreordained. In fact, to a shocking degree, it was created by the folly of the war's architects. But the officers who did raise their voices against the miscalculations, shortsightedness, and general failure of the war effort were generally crushed, their careers often ended. A willful blindness gripped political and military leaders, and dissent was not tolerated.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - HadriantheBlind - LibraryThing

Sobering and impressive analysis of the unmitigated disaster of foreign policy and warmongering that is Iraq. Now that the damage is starting to be cleaned up, I am cautiously optimistic, but there is still too much to be done here.Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - iftyzaidi - LibraryThing

The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks has written a dense, readable and highly-detailed account of the first 3 years of the American war in Iraq as seen and experienced from within the US military. It is ...Read full review

About the author (2006)

Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He was previously a fellow at the Center for a New American Security and is a contributing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, for which he writes the prizewinning blog The Best Defense. Ricks covered the U.S. military for The Washington Post from 2000 through 2008. Until the end of 1999 he had the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter for seventeen years. A member of two Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, he covered U.S. military activities in Somalia, Haiti, Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Kuwait, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He is the author of several books, including The Generals, The Gamble, and the number one New York Times bestseller Fiasco, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.